gather up the broken pieces
by tielan
Summary: It's an old wives' tale – that the first hour after you turn twenty two – whatever time of day it is, wherever they are or you are – you fall asleep and spend that one hour in the body of your soulmate, doing what they do, seeing what they see, living their life.


**NOTES: **_It's an old wives' tale – that the first hour after you turn twenty two – whatever time of day it is, wherever they are or you are – you fall asleep and spend that one hour in the body of your soulmate, doing what they do, seeing what they see, living their life._

**Warnings**: Implied dub-con in the first segment of this story (Raleigh is in no frame of mind to either consent, or care), and Raleigh gets into an abusive relationship at one point in the story. I have avoided being graphic in both cases.

**Gather Up The Broken Pieces**

He loses track of the days.

One more day without Yancy. One more day with the hole in his spirit tearing at him, threatening to drag him apart until he's nothing but shreds of soul.

After he leaves the PPDC, everything blurs. Days and nights become a montage of one fiery bottle of cheap booze after another, never quite soothing the ache that rips at him, day and night. He burns out his tastebuds and doesn't care that nothing tastes of anything except alcohol. The shelter kicks him out and into the street where he doesn't care enough to get up and walk away, and instead lies in a cardboard box until hunger drives him out. Then his mind spins, thoughts capering dizzily through his head as his fingers tangle in sweat-ridden bedsheets, drugged out of his mind while someone fucks him with short satisfied grunts. He comes, more by accident than his partner's design, and the pleasure is almost enough to clear his head for a few short seconds before he lapses back into a sea of pain that has nothing to with any physical ache.

Days cycle through endless waves of pain and he has no navigation skills to get through it until—

It's winter when he wakes up at a strange desk, crisp and clean and quiet, with a view out on mountains so familiar that he aches with the memory of home.

His breath catches in his throat as he starts up as the phone rings – a cheery little bopping tune from the handset propped up in the Hello Kitty charger on the table. He's late – he fell asleep. But he doesn't— He never— What—? Where—?

His heart is hammering against his chest and he doesn't know why he feels off-balance, lighter, his chest heavier, her body differe—

And then he realises. This isn't him, his body, his life.

This is his soulmate.

–

It's an old wives' tale – that the first hour after you turn twenty two – whatever time of day it is, wherever they are or you are – you fall asleep and spend that one hour in the body of your soulmate, doing what they do, seeing what they see, living their life. Not everyone has a soulmate, though.

Yancy didn't and scoffed at the idea.

_One person in all the world who's supposed to complete you? What kind of bullshit is that?_

Raleigh had never thought he needed anyone to complete him; after all he had Yancy.

–

She stabs one finger at the phone, and Raleigh notices the symbols on her screen – Japanese or maybe Korean – one of the East Asian languages. The name on the phone is simply 'Chuck', no photograph or icon.

"Where the bloody hell are you?" The voice on the other end of the phone is young, male, and kind of English – no, Raleigh realises, _Australian_.

"I just woke up," she says, her English sweetly accented. "I am sorry, Chuck. It was a late night—"

The boy on the other end of the line interrupts. "If you can't be bothered keeping a date, then don't fucking well agree to come out!"

"I was studying—"

"Oh, and that's even better. I'm less important to you than your bloody engineering texts! Well, I'm not waiting for you, and I'm not going to put off seeing this show just because you're too caught up in your studies to notice anything around you!"

Raleigh feels the tickle of agitation in her throat, the huff of frustration. "Chuck, that is not fair. I never asked for—"

"You never do. That's half the problem!" And then there's nothing but the dial tone in the air and her sigh of frustration and annoyance as she jabs at the screen.

Her finger hovers over the 'call number' icon for a moment, but she shakes her head and just puts her head back down on the desk. Raleigh feels the lump in her throat and the soreness of her eyes before she squeezes them shut.

He wants to tell her that it's okay – that she's not alone, she's got _him_ – but he can't. He's just along for the ride – and, he thinks, having him probably isn't very encouraging, is it? Besides, it looks like she doesn't need it, because she sits up and grabs a tissue from a box on the shelf next to the set of old manga novels and a Jaeger figurine of Coyote Tango, and wipes her eyes and blows her nose.

Then she sets her shoulders, and he can almost feel her resolution – fierce as a welding torch, determined as a Jaeger pushing her way through the sea – she's not going to think about Chuck any more.

She reaches for her tablet, intending to study, but there's a restlessness in her now, and she just wants out of her room, out of the apartment – anywhere but here!

Her chair shoves back as she stands. Phone, keys, slim over-the-shoulder purse. He glimpses bits of her room through her eyes – things she doesn't really see any more, they're so familiar that she's long since ceased to notice them. She pulls on a dark coat and a scarlet scarf with easy, familiar motions, and flips her hair over the collar. She doesn't look in the mirror when she leaves, so he can't see her face, what she looks like.

For the next hour, Raleigh wanders with her through the streets of a city that looks vaguely familiar – it might even be Anchorage, although not a part he's ever seen before. He wanders with her through a world he barely remembers – one where the street under his feet doesn't reek of refuse and bodily fluids, and the people around him meet his gaze and don't immediately look away, and the veggie skewer she buys from the vendor is hot and delicious and spicy as she turns away and the world suddenly spins—

Raleigh wakes in the remains of a cardboard box, cold and miserable and empty.

–

Life goes on without Yancy, dazed and aching and only half-there.

He tries not to think about the girl with the Hello Kitty charger, the manga collection, and the heart wounded by an Australian called Chuck. He didn't see her face – not clearly, just in the dark shadows of the window glass, in the way she turned her head as she walked along the street, her head up, her carriage proud.

She's a girl from a good family, a young woman with a future.

What does he have to offer someone like that? Half a soul and a headful of trauma – that's all.

–

The one year anniversary of Knifehead is a nightmare. Raleigh spends two weeks as drunk and drugged out as is humanly possible. But the Yancy-shaped hole in him is always there, jagged and empty.

He wakes up in soft sheets and sunshine – clean and dry and thirsty.

He flounders for a moment, dragging at the sheets as he tries to get his bearings.

"Well," says a woman in the lounge by the window, her smile bright and engaging beneath a gleaming swing of blonde hair, "I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever wake up, Raleigh Becket. You _are_ Raleigh Becket, aren't you?"

"I… Yes." Raleigh stares at her. She matches the décor of the room – stylish, classy, expensive. Maybe in her late twenties? It's hard to tell. "Have we met?"

"Not really. I found you lying out in the street two nights ago. I figured you were looking for a place to stay. My name's Jessy."

Jessy gives him somewhere to stay – the spare room of her apartment in the expensive part of town. She gives him a class of alcohol that's so far above the stuff he's been drinking that it seems almost a shame to down it as fast as he does. She doesn't bother him – at least, not at first.

When she climbs into his bed, he figures it's fair. He's been living on her largesse, she expects to get something back from him. And she's pretty enough, and sex is something that doesn't need his soul.

Only she cries afterwards. Says it hurt more than she expected, and he doesn't know what to do except apologise. And learn how she likes it. Which mostly seems to involve her being a cocktease, and making him beg for her to take him.

The first time Jessy strikes him, he's too far in drink and orgasm to protest. And it's not a hard hit – just a light slap. She's out of bed as soon as he's done, though, getting a balm to put on his skin and kissing it to make it better. And it's not so bad - the sting is quite a nice feeling.

She doesn't hit him again for a while – another two months. That time she's drunk and angry after a fight with her father. She works Raleigh until he's hard, rides him until he's panting, then slaps him hard across the mouth when he comes before she finishes.

He goes down on her with his mouth still stinging, and she apologises afterwards, pretty and penitent.

It's just one of several small things through the summer. Temper tantrums, screaming arguments when nothing he says is right, the cold shoulder, and occasionally threats. By fall, everything he says, everything he does is carefully thought out so as not to provoke her. Not that it helps.

She's always sorry afterwards – he's so good to put up with her, he's the only man who's ever understood her, and she doesn't know what she'll do if he left her...

He feels sorry for her – a poor little rich girl.

And the truth is that he has nowhere else to go.

–

"You have to get out of here, Rals."

Raleigh stares blankly at his brother, sitting on the apartment's fine leather couch, feet up on the ottoman.

More surprisingly, a pair of slim, bare feet rest on Yancy's thighs as she sprawls the length of the couch. Her head is turned towards the wall, so Raleigh can't see her face, but he can tell she's asleep from the way the tablet lies on her chest. Another engineering text? He wonders if she's still seeing Chuck, or is there another boy who takes second place to her studies?

He drags his gaze away from the curve of her head, the long, fall of jet hair across her shoulder. "And do what, Yance? What am I fit to do anymore?"

"Anything's better than this," says Yancy.

–

Raleigh escapes from Jessy on his twenty-third birthday, ducking out through the kitchen of the expensive restaurant they're dining at that night.

That night he sleeps locked up in the back room of a secondhand clothing store after charming the shopgirl into letting him bunk down there. He doesn't mind being locked up – at least he's not caged in.

He dreams of standing at the edge of the ocean, watching Yancy splash a girl whose hair blows across her face in the gusting winds, obscuring her features as she shrieks with laughter and splashes Yancy back. And Raleigh hurts like someone stuck knives into him, but it's a clean pain – not the black despair that clawed the tattered edges of his soul and threatened to drag him into oblivion.

Next morning, Raleigh sets out for the work gangs along the ocean foreshore, cleaning up _Kaiju_ blue.

It's a relief to work himself to exhaustion every night – to do the job that needs to be done. He'll never escape the emptiness - the thought comes to him one night just before his body falls asleep – but he can get to a point where he's adjusted to it.

If anyone ever adjusts to losing part of their soul.

The _Kaiju_ blue clean-up gangs move up and down the coast, catching ships to where they're needed, subsisting on the newly-introduced ration cards, which provide a working man with enough sustenance to feed his body. In time, they're told, nearly everyone will be rationed. Somehow Raleigh doubts that Jessy and her kind will ever be rationed.

He works. He keeps his head down. He's recognised – but he doesn't capitalise on the attention.

Once, they see the Sikorskys carrying a Jaeger back to its Shatterdome and the men stop and stare, because how often do they get to see a Jaeger? Raleigh stands and watches with them, because it's a break from the work and he wants to know which Jaeger it is.

Mammoth Apostle, piloted by Kyisha Samuels and Shani Washington – cousins out of the Tri-city area in North Carolina. _Raleigh, North Carolina,_ Kyisha said the first time they met._ What the hell is whitebread like you doing with a name like that?_

"Guess that's nothing special for you, eh?"

Raleigh watches the Sikorskys and their payload soar overhead until they're nothing more than a speck on the horizon. "It's always special."

That night is particularly bad. He wakes up four times, gasping for breath, conscious of the hole in him that burns and stings, like someone doused it with vinegar. Clean pain is still pain.

Lying in the dark, trying to moderate his breathing in the dorm, Raleigh isn't sure how much more he can take of the emptiness. The world is too full of fragments of his brother, but not all those fragments gathered together can ever make up the whole.

The next morning, a new man joins their workgroup – Kenichi, better known to the men as 'Kenny'. He's a quiet guy, a hard worker, and haunted. He doesn't ask questions, doesn't answer the sneers, just puts his head down and works. Raleigh likes him; someone who just accepts him, who he can accept as someone else who's lost the people he loved.

"My wife and son," he tells Raleigh one night on the way back to the housing. "They were visiting her family in Osaka during an attack."

"I'm sorry."

"I thought of killing myself," Kenny reflects. "But there's too much work in the world and not enough people to do it. This is as good a way to die as any."

Raleigh thinks about this – about choices of living and dying. He considered suicide after Knifehead, but imagined Yancy scowling at him. _Don't even think about it, bro. Beckets fight; they don't give up. _

"Will you—?" He hesitates over the request, but it's partway out now. "Will you teach me Japanese?"

Kenny looks at him, surprised and disbelieving, then asks, "Why?" Then, almost amused, "Is there a woman involved?"

Raleigh thinks of her, thinks about meeting her – about being able to talk with her in her own language and not just requiring her to meet him in his. It would never happen, of course – she's studying engineering far, far away and he's working on shore clean-up. She's destined for a better life than he could ever offer her.

But...if it did...

"Kind of."

Kenny tilts his head, then shrugs. "Okay."

–

His accent is terrible and probably always will be, Kenny tells him. "But most people won't care. You are trying, at least."

Raleigh tries harder. If he's not so good at the pronunciation, he learns how to ask someone's name (politely), how to ask after her health (politely), how to ask about her family (still politely), and works out how to say, "_This sounds crazy, but I dreamed of you when I was twenty-two and I think you're my soulmate._"

There's not really any polite way to say that.

Except that the last one isn't a translation so much as a transliteration, and when Kenny hears him trying it out and wants to know what he's really trying to say, Raleigh finds himself having to explain all of it.

In a bar, with the rest of the work-gang listening in and his nape and ears burning hot as Gipsy's reactor.

–

The problem isn't that the rest of the guys in the work gang know about Raleigh and his soulmate; the problem is that they insist on telling him stories.

"Forty years older!"

"She was ugly. And I don't just mean plain, but _ugly_."

"It was a _guy_." The speaker gets a look at Raleigh's expression. "Well, it's all fine if you swing that way."

Those are the ones that he can dismiss. Age, appearance, and gender don't bother Raleigh.

Worse are the other ones – the terrifyingly real possibilities.

The woman who was in an abusive relationship but refused to leave her partner for her soulmate.

The man who spotted the picture of his soulmate in one of the memorial shrines dedicated to the victims of Trespasser – a man who'd died only one week earlier.

The guy who thought he'd found his soulmate when she was twenty. And then she turned twenty-two – and dreamed of someone else.

"I think 'soulmate' is the wrong word," says Kenny one night as they're on their way back to the barracks. "'Kindred soul' is better. The original idea connects two people – not in love or relationship, but destiny. Shared purpose. But common purpose isn't enough anymore; must be _romantic_."

But there's one story that hits Raleigh hard.

"I met her when we were twenty-nine. She was...everything I never knew I wanted." Andy is one of the guys in the gang, forty, hard-weathered, and quiet. He doesn't usually talk to Raleigh – or, really, anyone. "But she was already married, see. Had a husband and two kids. And she was happy with her life – really content – not just pretending. It...it radiated out of her. She was that kind of woman – she'd make her own happiness, her own joy."

"Did she know?"

"I think so. We never talked about it. She loved him, see? And he loved her. Not just...cosmic destiny, but the hard yards of promises kept. And she wasn't one to cheat on her promises, and I wasn't going to make her break them, so we were...friends. _Just_ friends."

Raleigh doesn't question it. Not all the non-family co-pilot pairs were sexual – Drift intimacy didn't have to be, that was just how some pilots worked it out. Sometimes, it was enough to walk in tune, in time, to know there was someone walking beside you who knew the worst of you and trusted you with themselves and the Jaeger all the same.

_Oh, God, Yancy..._

"What happened?"

Andy shrugged. "I started to resent what I didn't have, she was starting to feel torn. Wasn't right to do that to her, wasn't good to do that to myself. So I left."

Raleigh doesn't ask if Andy's ever been back. He doesn't need to.

–

He goes out the night of his birthday to stand on the shore they finished cleaning just that morning.

He listens to the waves rolling in along the beach and breathes in the salt air, clear of the oily scent of _Kaiju_ blue. He still feels empty most days. There's not anything can stop that.

Will it ever stop aching? Does it matter? Even if it stopped tomorrow there's not enough of him left to offer to someone like the girl whose eyes he dreamed through. She should have more than anything he can offer her.

Raleigh's thought about going to find her. Just to meet her, once, to know that she's alive, to know that her life's good. But Andy's words echo in his head: _Wasn't right to do that to her, wasn't good to do that to myself. _

Better not. Better to leave well enough alone.

–

The next year is a bad one for the Jaeger program. The _Kaiju_ come faster now, with less breaks between attacks. They get larger – more Category IIIs and Category IVs, which means the Jaegers have to fight them harder, take more damage. And the governments of the world are growing tired of financing a war that seems to have no end.

When the Wall is first suggested, Raleigh thinks they're mad. The _Kaiju_ will just go through a wall – and they can't build a wall that big or that long...can they?

Apparently they believe they can.

More importantly, they have the world believing that it can be done. That the Jaegers – while producing exciting and dramatic fights – are a reckless money-sucking initiative that's run by cowboy-types who are thinking more of getting in a good fight than the good of the world. _If we down and block off the _Kaiju_ access to the land, they'll get tired of trying and just go away._

Raleigh has no words to describe how _wrong_ this is, and who'd listen to him anyway? He's a washed out pilot, a former rock star with nowhere to go and nobody left to him.

He does his shifts, eats his food, feels the ache in his left shoulder, and misses his brother, although now it's just a dull pang.

That year, he has sex for the first time since Jessy. With a woman called Amalia who recognises him as Raleigh Becket and takes him back to her rooms. "I'm pretty sure I had a fantasy or a dozen about this." Her mouth twists. "You probably get that a lot from people."

"Not really," he says, his hand resting on her wrist – fine bones, fine skin, fine lines. Not delicate or fragile, but graceful and strong through the flesh of her body. Beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with conventional prettiness.

He cries a little afterwards. It's a relief to know he's not broken that way – that he can still trust someone enough to climb into bed and give his body – give _pleasure_ without fearing the pain. And Amalia holds him tight, and doesn't say anything about his tears.

"Gipsy Danger was always my favourite Jaeger." Her goodbye kiss is sweet and brisk. "I'm sorry about your brother."

On the walk back to the worker housing, Raleigh wonders about the girl – _his_ girl, even though she's not _his_ and never will be. How old is she now? What's she like? Does she still study in her spare time, walk like she has somewhere to be and things to do, look about her with bright intelligence and keen interest?

She was old enough to be dating boys three years ago. Has she ever fallen in love? Has she had a guy in her bed telling her she's beautiful and sexy? Has she ever had someone in her body, pleasing her until she can't think?

Will she dream through Raleigh's eyes when she turns twenty-two?

_Please, God, no_. He stands outside the grim, grubby doors of the old, converted factory where the work gang are housed and looks up at the stars, begging for this much. _She should have the hope of something better than me._

–

It looks like the Wall is going to become a reality. When they start asking for workers on the foundation, Raleigh signs up.

"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" Kenny asks that night. They've stuck together these last eighteen months, stuck with the work, stuck with the Japanese lessons. He'll never get to use them, but that's okay. "That's dangerous work."

Raleigh shrugs. "It's as good a way as any to die."

Kenny sighs and shakes his head. He doesn't sign up for the Wall, but he shakes Raleigh's hand when it comes time for them to part ways. "Your accent is still terrible."

"I'll work on it. Look after yourself."

"_You_ look after yourself." He hesitates. "And good luck. With your soulmate."

Raleigh doesn't need luck. His girl is growing up – grown up by now – living her own life, making her own future. He doesn't have a part in that. He never will.

He works his way back up north again, following the wall, feeding his body if not his soul.

On the fourth anniversary of Knifehead – February 29, the Leap Day – Raleigh gets stinking drunk.

Part of it's the grief and still missing Yancy.

Part of it's the knowledge that he's lived with the hole of Yancy's loss longer than he lived in the Drift with Yancy.

He wakes, shivering, in a street somewhere, and staggers home with the fading memory of a dream where Yancy leans on a gantry railing next to the open entrance of their Conn-Pod – and sighs. _Jesus, Rals, I leave you alone and you turn into a mess. Not even a hot one, I might add_.

It's a long, hard year. The world is getting colder, more brutal, the grim reality of an unwinnable war looming over humanity. Here and there, on the newscasts, he sees the Jaeger program mentioned. A few wins, but mostly losses. Pilots dead. Jaegers scrapped. And every now and then, a glimpse of Marshal Pentecost, still fighting the good fight with that stone cold expression, as though nothing touches him.

Raleigh moves around a lot – mostly Alaska – it's his home ground, and easier to find work than the more temperate climates.

But he feels the solitude cold and sharp against his skin. It's not always loneliness, but sometimes it is.

Sometimes he thinks of her, wonders what she's doing, where she is. Then he reminds himself that there's nothing he can give her that's better than what she already has. He can't let himself dwell on might-bes.

The fact is that he has his past and he has his present, but she has a future and he won't steal that from her.

–

Raleigh starts for Sitka amidst biting snowfall and the news that the PPDC will be shutting down the Shatterdomes all around the world. It's a brittle October that's predicted to move into a hellish winter for workers on the Wall.

On the walk to the pickup point for the transport, he thinks he's come to terms with his life. He can almost imagine Yancy sauntering along beside him – hands in his pockets, humming – and it doesn't hurt.

Sometimes Raleigh likes to imagine her walking on the other side. Not walking _with_ him, just walking alongside, unmet and unaware that he exists, while he can watch over in his own way.

_I hope you get what your heart desires, _Raleigh thinks, imagining her hair lifting with the breeze that blows around them, hiding the face he's never seen in real life or in his dreams. _I hope this year brings you everything you want_.

Behind him, the snow gently erases his footsteps as he goes.

**fin**


End file.
